* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR OCTOBER 2015: As discussed by an article from THE
ECONOMIST ("The Next Battle Begins", 24 October 2015), the nuclear control
pact with Iran became effective on 18 October. Resistance in the US Congress
amounted to nothing but noise, and the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament,
endorsed the deal by 161 to 59.

Iranian reformists are feeling powerful right now, believing that they have
successfully outflanked the country's hardliners, with Iranians obtaining
greater civil liberties and business picking up -- notions greatly to the
liking of most Iranian citizens. However, now Iran must implement the deal,
with sanctions not being lifted until certain benchmarks have been reached.
Implementing the provisions of the deal is not going to be trivial, and much
can go wrong.

The hardliners are not likely to remain passive in the course of the process.
There are factions among them, most prominently the Revolutionary Guards,
that liked the previous status quo, having benefited from sanctions, and they
also do not like the idea of letting down Iran's walls. According to an
analyst in Tehran: "The regime is scared of the ramifications. American
culture has more sexiness than a revolutionary guy can ever expect to have
today."

One of the arguments used by the hardliners is that the Americans will never
lift sanctions, since the US continues to make an issue of Iranian backing of
foreign organizations judged as terrorist, as well as Iranian abuses of human
rights. The Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, has cut off further
negotiations with the US, at least for the time being, and there appears to
be something of a crackdown going on -- over 700 people have been executed by
the state since the beginning of 2015, more than in several years.

However, the hardliners know that the public is desperate for change, and
dare not antagonize the citizens. It's not just a question of losing
support; older Iranians have unpleasant memories of the repressive regime of
the late unlamented Shah, and all but the most fanatical of the hardliners
have misgivings about turning 21st-century Iran into something like it. The
next big test will be elections in February 2016 for the Majlis and for the
Assembly of Experts, the body of around 80 people that will select the next
supreme leader should Khamenei die or step down -- he is 76, and has had
prostate cancer.

The blatantly rigged election of 2009 was a disaster that brought Iran to the
threshold of revolution, and nobody believes it will be repeated. There's
still much concern over what candidates will get through the vetting process,
run by the Guardians Council, a hand-picked body of 12 Islamic jurists, and
onto the ballot paper. Some 10,000 names are already rumored to be on its
blacklist. According to a Tehran analyst: "I am confident about Iran in the
long term. I just have no idea about the short term."

* On 27 October, the US Navy destroyer USS LASSEN cruised blithely through
the 12-nautical-mile limit declared by China around the Spratly Islands in
the South China Sea, where the Chinese have been building reefs into islands
through massive dredging. The Chinese government denounced the "intrusion",
saying China would respond to "deliberately provocative actions" by foreign
powers. The US government blandly replied that the destroyer had been
conducting "routine operations ... in accordance with international law." It
was a less-than-subtle hint that China should take the UN tribunal examining
the issue more seriously.

This was just another move on the global strategic chessboard by the Obama
Administration. An editorial in THE ECONOMIST ("Owl Meets Bear", 10 October
2015), examined the administration's strategic thinking through a focus on
Ashton Carter -- as of last February, the US secretary of defense, the Obama
Administration's fourth, replacing Leon Panetta.

Carter is a physicist by education who worked at the Pentagon in the Cold
War, puzzling out the uncertain possibilities of surviving a nuclear
exchange. Colleagues describe him as not a hawk, nor a dove -- but a cooly
analytical owl, making him representative of the administration's military
mindset. With regards to the Spratlys, Carter has made the US position
clear: "We are going to sail, fly, and operate wherever international law
permits."

In an interview, the defense secretary made it clear that if rival powers
challenge the US, the US will respond appropriately. Russian President
Vladimir Putin has persistently challenged the US, through his invasion of
the Ukraine, intimidation of NATO members in Eastern Europe, and nuclear
saber-rattling. In reply, the US has stepped up exercises, deployed
equipment to Eastern Europe, and is updating its own nuclear arsenal. As for
Putin's interventions in Syria, Carter dismissed them as "illogical, maybe
psychological" -- or in simple words, nuts.

Carter is echoing the sentiments of his boss, President Obama, who rightly
mocks the idea that Vladimir Putin's actions are shrewd. What has Russia got
out of its provocative actions? Nothing but isolation, sanctions, and
economic hardship; with Obama saying that Putin's intervention in Syria has
done nothing but mire Russia down in a "quagmire". Obama hasn't been much
more kindly to presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton and other Democrats who
have advocated greater US efforts in Syria, calling such notions "half-baked"
and "mumbo-jumbo".

Indeed, it is difficult to find much basis in fact for the claims of Obama's
domestic critics that he is a military weakling. Much to the president's
disappointment, he is retaining US troops in Afghanistan, even though he
promised to bring them all home. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his
forces needed the help and backup; Obama gave it to him. The administration
has also dispatched a force of 300 to Cameroon to help in the fight against
the Islamist Boko Haram group. The Americans will conduct airborne
surveillance in the region to help counter the militants, who are expanding
their operations beyond their base in Nigeria.

The issue of appropriate use of American military power is perplexing,
nothing resembling the simplistic vision of the administration's critics.
The Obama Administration believes that US military actions need to be
carefully and cooly considered, evaluated on their relevance to the interests
of America and its allies, as well as their probability of success. If the
bottom line shows that the US shouldn't intervene, then it's not going to
happen.

Obama and Carter are professorial men, and it seems that this professorial
mindset is one of the major things that upset the critics. War isn't for
sissy professors, it's for Pattons -- fighters who charge in and kick ass.
Those who know more about the real Patton realize that, though he was indeed
a fighting general who could certainly win battles, such an emotional,
egocentric, and impulsive man would have been a poor choice for directing a
war. Winning battles is a different issue from determining if a battle
should be fought; or if there's some less costly way to do things; or if
there's any way to do them at all.

* On 25 September, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced that he would
retire from office at the end of October. He expected to be replaced by
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, but then announced he would not seek the
position, with Boehner saying he would remain until a successor could be
chosen.

As discussed by an essay of Jeremy Carl of the Hoover Institution, the fall
of Boehner brought to the surface the hidden civil war between the Republican
Party's moderates and extremists -- the latter being represented by the
"Freedom Caucus" in the House. The membership roster is not published, but
can be easily determined by the voting record of Republican Congressmen.
They are generally junior representatives, split between Christian
conservatives and libertarians, and mostly male; surprisingly, minorities are
more strongly represented among the Freedom Caucus than the Republican House
in general, and the caucus has a higher level of academic achievement in
top-50 universities.

Boehner was forced out after pushing through a budget resolution that allowed
the government to go on operating after 30 September. The Freedom Caucus
was trying to use the threat of a government shutdown to force all funding to
be cut for Planned Parenthood. Boehner had made it clear that he was hostile
to Planned Parenthood -- but he knew there wasn't enough support to take
serious action against it, and didn't feel that a forced government shutdown
was a sensible way to get anything done.

That was the last straw for the Freedom Caucus. It is a simple statement of
fact that Republican leadership has been unable to overturn a single one of
President Obama's major initiatives; members of the Freedom Caucus felt House
Republicans needed more forceful leadership, and so Boehner had to go. Kevin
McCarthy was found wanting as well.

One wonders if the Freedom Caucus needs to be reminded of the saying: Be
careful what you wish for, you may get it. It is certainly an irony that
they don't appear to realize that one of the major reasons Obama has been
getting his own way is because the Republicans can't get a consensus among
themselves; nor that demanding a full loaf, instead of settling for half, may
well mean ending up with none. The reason Boehner wasn't any friend of the
Freedom Caucus was because, no matter how much he sympathized with their
goals, he knew it would accomplish nothing for the GOP to be one.

Since there are 247 Republican Representatives, it is a fantasy to think that
such a small minority will be able to call the tune indefinitely -- as just
as much a fantasy that extraordinary political tactics, such as forced
government shutdowns, can do anything more than further discredit Congress,
with polls already showing it in the lowest rank of US public esteem.

* WINGS & WEAPONS: On 27 October, the US Air Force awarded
Northrop Grumman a contract for the "Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B)", to be
the mainstay of America's future strategic bomber force. The LRS-B will
reach initial operational capability in the mid-2020s, with 100 to be built,
estimated price being $511 million USD each at that quantity. Northrop
Grumman beat Boeing and Lockheed Martin for the contract; there's a lot of
money involved, so the losers are expected to appeal.

The Air Force was obviously expecting that, and no doubt is pre-prepared to
rebut challenges. Indeed, by all indications, the USAF was extremely
methodical in setting up the program, suggesting the Pentagon has become sick
of weapons procurement fiascos. The LRS-B program grew out of the "Next
Generation Bomber (NGB)" program, initiated in 2006, and cancelled in 2009.
The cancellation of NGB was partly due to budget cuts, but also to the fact
that it was overly ambitious, envisioned as performing a wide range of roles,
and using new technology all along the board.

The lesson seems to have finally soaked in on the military that it isn't wise
to built a weapon system that can do everything, that its mission be
reasonably specified, and that a new design should leverage off existing
technology when possible -- but made to be easily upgraded to new subsystems
as they come available, and adaptable to new missions.

Frustratingly, effectively no details or specifications for the LRS-B are
known just yet; no service designation has been announced, either. It is
believed that it will be a stealthy flying-wing aircraft with subsonic
performance, smaller than the B-2, with space and weight provision for future
upgrades. Since the program has been announced to the public, more
information is likely to be forthcoming in the near future.

Hopefully, we may also learn something about the mystery flying-wing aircraft
photographed flying high over Amarillo, Texas, in 2014, and mentioned
here
at the time -- there being a suspicion that it was an LRS-B demonstrator.
However, it could just as easily have been for a completely unknown "black"
program, which will remain hidden for some time longer.

* The US Army's "Joint Air to Ground Missile (JAGM)", intended to be the
service's next-generation anti-armor missile, has undergone a painful
series of zig and zags, as discussed
here
early this year. Much to everyone's relief, Lockheed Martin has been given
the green light to go ahead with full development of the initial-series JAGM,
which will feature a dual mode seeker, with millimeter-wave radar and
semi-active laser homing. Initial operational capability is expected in
2018. Later development will feature a triple-mode seeker, presumably with
some class of "smart" target recognition with an optical-infrared imager, and
extended range.

* Social media company Facebook is dabbling in aerospace, having unveiled the
prototype of a solar-powered flying-wing drone, the "Aquila", which is to
fly above 18,300 meters (60,000 feet) for three months, acting as an internet
communications relay in regions of the world now denied access. Internet
search giant Google is similarly building a solar-powered drone for data
relay, having obtained the Titan Aerospace firm to that end.

The Aquila is a pure flying wing in the shape of a shallow vee, with winglets
on the wingtips, and four electric motors driving two-bladed props. The
Aquila is made primarily of carbon composite and has a span of 42 meters (138
feet). The drone is being constructed in Yeovil, UK, by a firm named
Ascenta, bought out by Facebook in early 2014. Ascenta had been founded by a
veteran of the Zephyr solar-powered drone project, the Zephyr having set a
record for long-endurance, powered flight in 2010. First flight of the
Aquila is expected in 2016.

* LOOPY DNA: As discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE Online ("3D Map
Of DNA Reveals Hidden Loops That Allow Genes To Work Together" by Elizabeth
Pennisi, 11 December 2014), it is well-known that the DNA molecule, the
carrier of heredity, encodes genes using sequences of its three nucleotides,
assembled into long double-helix chains. The DNA in a single human cell, if
all stretched out end-to-end, runs to a staggering two meters in length;
that's not so surprising, given the complexity of the human organism, but it
does lead to the question of how all that DNA is packed up into such a small
space -- and also of the significance of the way it's packed up.

The "double helix" configuration of DNA is well-known, but a DNA molecule has
also has a three-dimensional configuration that is important to its
functioning. To turn a gene on or off, it must be in contact with the
appropriate regulatory DNA that controls its activity, and the two may be
very far apart. Molecular biologists have long suspected the way DNA folds
up in the nucleus is key to making these connections. They acquired tricks
to nail down such connections one at a time, but there was no way to make
real progress with such limited techniques.

In 2009, Erez Lieberman Aiden -- a biologist now at Baylor College of
Medicine (BCM) in Houston, Texas -- and his colleagues came up with a trick
they called "Hi-C" to look at all the connections at once. However, they
couldn't nail down the connections to less than a million-base resolution,
many times larger than the size of a gene; they could only locate connections
in broad "compartments", not precise locations. They also could only use the
technique on DNA that had been removed from the nucleus, which affected
folding.

Now Suhas Rao and Miriam Huntley of BCM have figured out how to zero in on
details as small as a thousand bases, that being smaller than a typical gene,
and have been able to use their technique to probe DNA inside a cell nucleus.
They have drawn up 3D DNA maps for eight lines of human cells, including
cancer and basic tissues, and for one mouse cancer cell line. For one human
lymphoid cancer cell line, for example, they detected a staggering 4.9
billion contacts between pairs of DNA pieces; for other cell types, the
number of contacts ranged from 395 million to 1.1 billion.

The more contacts between two particular pieces of DNA, the closer together
those pieces are in 3D space. Working with sophisticated computer programs,
the researchers used the contacts to produce the maps. They plotted how many
times a pair of DNA pieces made contact, and from that data, determined where
each piece of DNA was relative to all the rest of the DNA.

A new paper released by the BCM researchers says the genome is arranged in
about 10,000 loops of DNA, each established by a connection at the base of
the loop. In each different cell type, different pieces of DNA come in
contact, meaning the loop patterns change from cell type to cell type. These
differences in structure may set up the different patterns of gene activity
that define each cell type. In cells from female donors, the researchers
also noticed gigantic loops in one of the X chromosomes; they suspect that a
loop silences the second X chromosome, as is necessary for the proper
functioning of the still active X chromosome's genes.

The researchers also compared maps of the mouse and human cancer cells. The
maps were very similar, with most of the same loops, indicating that the 3D
arrangements that define a specific type of cell have not changed much during
evolution. The Aiden lab has set up a website that works a little like
Google Earth: researchers can locate their favorite gene, and drill down
from compartment to loop to the DNA it touches. However, other approaches to
probing the 3D structure of DNA have given different maps. Aiden is all in
favor of the diversity, saying: "You want to have multiple lines of
experimentation that can confirm one another or conflict one another."

To sort things out, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) set up a "4D
Nucleome" program in July 2014 -- to run five years, funded at $24 million
USD a year. It's called "4D", because the nucleome structure changes as a
cell ages, differentiates, and divides. Still, the bioscience community sees
the BCM work as a big first step, that all it needs is refinement. Wouter
de Laat, a molecular biologist at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the
Netherlands, says: "It sheds a light in a dark room. It puts things into
perspective."

* TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST
("The Software Secretaries", 12 September 2015), Apple introduced the
voice-operated Siri personal assistant -- discussed
here
in 2014 -- for the iPhone in 2011; despite its limitations, it has proven a
hit. Apple has now unveiled a set-top box with a remote featuring Siri, not
only permitting voice control of the box, but also allowing a user to perform
searches for weather or sports results.

Siri has spawned imitators, Google offering "Google Now" and Microsoft
offering "Cortana", both of which harvest digital knowledge of their users.
Amazon sells a very "smart" bluetooth speaker named "Echo" that can respond
to voice commands, control wireless appliances in the home, and of course
allow users to buy Amazon products; Amazon has also introduced a new version
of their Kindle Fire video downloading system that responds to voice
commands. Chinese internet giant Baidu has now introduced their personal
assistant, named "Duer", and Facebook is making noises about an assistant
system via their messaging app.

The technology still leaves something to be desired, but it's an idea whose
time has come, and it means changes for computing. Searching is becoming
less a matter of figuring out how to phrase Google queries, than it is asking
questions of an intelligent agent that's smart enough to find what the user
wants. More significantly, instead of sets of apps, users are increasingly
getting things done via a personal assistant that can take on an extensible
range of tasks. According to market research firm Gartner, about 38% of
American consumers have used virtual assistants on their smartphones; by the
end of 2016, two-thirds of consumers in the developed world will use them
daily.

The virtual assistants being produced by the tech giants are the entering
wedge of a wider effort to refine and exploit artificial intelligence (AI)
technology, particularly "machine learning" -- in which computers do not
simply follow a rigid program, but crunch through mountains of data, sift
patterns out of it, and then determine how to do their tasks better. The big
tech firms are spending billions to buy up AI startup companies, and AI
experts are in great demand.

The current virtual assistants are getting better at speech recognition,
though they still have room for improvement. When Google Now was introduced,
it mangled about 25% of the words spoken to it, but now the defect rate has
been reduced to 8%. While work goes on to reduce that rate further, a
parallel effort is focusing on how to use the information consumers store
on devices to second-guess users, instead of just passively answering
questions -- such "anticipatory software" having been discussed
here
early this year. For example, Google Now goes through users' emails, and
then reminds them of appointments and flights.

GPS location is also being factored in; if a user makes a reminder to buy
milk, the virtual assistant will issue the reminder when the user goes into a
supermarket. One of the latest refinements is the automated arrangement of
meetings. It typically requires a series of emails to set up a meeting;
several startups are working on robots that are copied on emails proposing
meetings, with a robot then scanning through the calendars of all involved to
find the best time. Another effort is to link virtual assistants with each
other, even across vendor lines, and develop online services that augment
virtual assistants, instead of passively responding to their requests.

People tend to be pleasant to virtual assistants, even though the software
doesn't care if they are or not. That's not really surprising, since
everyone knows the virtual assistant is unfailingly obedient and helpful; it
is not judgemental; it does not try to conceal anything from the user. Being
curt and nasty to it accomplishes nothing -- it doesn't really accomplish
much to be inconsiderate to humans who are trying to be cooperative, either
-- and sane people get little gratification in being mean to a machine.

Human personal assistants are not likely to be replaced by virtual
assistants, at least for now. They do well at simple tasks, but struggle
with more complicated ones, such as planning a trip. They can deal with
straightforward requests, but can't understand those that are not well
defined.

Virtual assistants will soon be all but universal, and that leads to two
problems. The first is privacy; a virtual assistant necessarily knows a
great deal about its user, and that information can be misused by others.
Obviously, the virtual assistant needs provisions for data security; but
there's also the fact that the vendors who provide virtual assistants want to
get their hands on that data, too. Google Now, of course, mines consumer
data and targets ads. In contrast, Apple has been peddling privacy.

The second problem is commerce. Virtual assistants end up making lots of
purchases -- in fact, Amazon's Echo is optimized for purchases through
Amazon.com. That suggests the possibility of tilting the playing field to
particular vendors, at the expense of competitors and the consumers. If a
user asks a virtual assistant to book a plane flight, will the result be the
best price? Virtual assistants are certainly helpful and detached; but
can we be sure they be impartial?

* MAXIMIZING EFFICIENCY (1): As discussed by an article from THE
ECONOMIST ("Green Around The Edges", 11 April 2015), from the beginning of
the industrial revolution, it became a truism that economic growth meant more
power consumption. Since the turn of the century, that linkage has been
weakening: in 2014, advanced industrialized countries used 0.9% less
electricity than in 2013, and slightly less even than in 2007, even though
their combined economies have grown by 6.3% since that time.

While environmental denialists dismiss energy conservation, as discussed
here
in 2008, it is already significant; it is certain to become more so. A study
from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) identified two factors in push towards
energy efficiency:

The simple problem of cost: as energy becomes more expensive, end-users
have an economic incentive to reduce its use, and invest in means of
doing so.

The related spread of energy-efficient technology, including improved
insulation; better heating and cooling systems; and new gadgetry, such
as LED lamps.

All the improvements in energy efficiency are still not enough to offset
climate change -- but few think that we're close to diminishing returns on
energy efficiency, while the technology options to make it happen are
continuously growing, and becoming cheaper overall. Few are going to be
against energy efficiency if it pays for itself.

However, progress towards a more energy-efficient world has been
frustratingly slow. The International Energy Agency (IEA) -- a research
organization for countries that import fossil fuels -- estimates that global
spending on energy efficiency needs to rise from $300 billion USD a year
today to $680 billion USD. Unfortunately, the UNEP report says the
likelihood of that happening is "very slim".

Advocates of energy efficiency find the complacent attitude exasperating,
since it's obvious that gains would be obtained if the will was there.
Transport accounts for 27% of global energy demand. Lighting, heating,
cooling and ventilating buildings account for about another third.

New vehicles and buildings are far more efficient than old ones. Vehicle
efficiency standards to be introduced in the US in 2016 will reduce their
fuel consumption by 27%; a US home built to 2012 standards is 36% more
efficient than one built to 2006 standards. New "passive homes", which not
only use energy-efficient systems but are also designed to obtain the maximum
energy benefit from their local environment, can do even better. Throw in
solar panels or geothermal energy, it is then possible to create "net-zero"
buildings that can put as much energy back into the power grid as they draw
from it.

One difficulty is that vehicles are replaced once every ten years or so, but
half the buildings standing today will still be standing in 2050. That means
the current challenge is to make existing structures more efficient. The
simplest approach is to simply make use of heating and cooling smarter; there
is, for example, no reason to heat empty rooms. Identifying waste and
providing a plan on how to reduce it is now a growth industry. Opower, a
data-analytics firm, crunches figures on size, occupancy, location, and
energy bills to find trends and make suggestions to 50 million, mostly
American, households. According to Pacific Gas and Electric, a California
utility, in 2013 Opower saved 500 gigawatt-hours, or nearly 75,000
homes-worth, of consumption, cutting customer bills by more than $50 million
USD.

Such simple measures only trim energy use by a few percent -- though since
they don't cost much to implement, they pay themselves off quickly. However,
they do focus end-user attention on energy conservation, with consumers then
inclined to replace inefficient appliances, and install efficient cooling and
heating systems.

Automating energy use in response to utility demand management takes consumer
energy conservation to the next level. If utilities charge higher rates for
power at peak times, consumers will have an incentive to shift their power
use to off-peak times, using automation to handle the rebalancing, aided by
"smart" boilers that switch off when necessary, as well as battery packs that
can be charged up at low-demand times. This is particularly useful for
air-conditioning systems; a US firm named Calmac sells building cooling
systems that turn water into ice during the cool times when power is cheap,
and use the ice to keep a building cool during times when it's hot, and power
is expensive. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (88): Lebanon had conducted elections in July 1958, with
General Chehab becoming the new president. Chehab would prove smooth and
skilled in dealing with the baroque complexities of Lebanese politics,
affirming stability and helping to bring greater prosperity to Lebanon. The
Americans began pulling out their troops in early August; they would all be
out by the end of October.

The indignation over the US intervention in Lebanon had spread to Beijing.
From late 1957 Mao, frustrated with stalled discussions over rejoining Taiwan
with the mainland, worked to give up the peaceful approach to the matter.
The ambassadorial-level talks between China and the US in Warsaw were
suspended at that time -- though it appears due to procedural issues, and not
a Chinese policy decision. Under pressure from Mao, in the spring Zhou Enlai
confessed to his "errors" in seeking a diplomatic solution and resigned as
foreign minister, though he still remained the premier of the Chinese Council
of Ministers.

In parallel to the correction of the CCP's direction, Mao also had been
building up forces in coastal China for a confrontation with Jiang. Mao did
not regard Jiang as his real enemy, seeing him as a tool of the Americans.
To Mao, US backing of Jiang's Nationalist Taiwan was "interference in
internal Chinese affairs", a continued foreign occupation of Chinese
territory, as demonstrated by the presence of US forces on Taiwan.

The American and British military intervention in the Middle East was, as Mao
saw it, more meddling by the Western powers in the affairs of other nations;
something needed to be done by China to show that such high-handed conduct
had a cost. In addition, Mao was a revolutionary who believed in revolution
first, last, and always. Having evicted the Nationalists from the mainland,
he wished to continue his revolutionary mobilization of the Chinese people,
driving them in greater efforts to make China the great nation it had once
been, once more. Mao called the new initiative "the Great Leap Forward",
having announced it publicly in January; it would accelerate the
collectivization of agriculture -- already in progress since 1956, though not
with very good results -- and boost Chinese industry in a single jump.

As with the war in Korea, a military confrontation would provide a focal
point for a new phase of the ongoing revolution. In the wake of the
occupation of Lebanon, Mao ordered a force buildup in Fujian province in
preparation to taking action against Quemoy and Matsu. From late in the
month, there were heavy troop movements to Fujian province, with a steady
arrival of air assets, along with trainloads of soldiers and battlefield
gear, particularly artillery and ammunition. The initial deadline for
beginning the shelling was 25 July -- though that date would pass
without incident.

The Chinese were not coordinating their plans with the Soviets. The Kremlin
had proposed to the Chinese that the two countries create a joint submarine
base in China, and similarly put up a long-wave radio station, with China
granted access to the Soviet naval base in Murmansk in return. To say that
Mao was not enthusiastic about such notions would be an understatement. On
22 July, Mao met with Soviet Ambassador Pavel Yudin -- and simply erupted,
seeing the proposals as slighting, more evidence of Soviet "big power
chauvinism". Mao accused the Soviets of trying to control China, and curtly
said that if Khrushchev had business with China, he should come and make his
case personally.

Khrushchev promptly flew to Beijing to mend fences, thinking that Yudin had
been tactless, or had been misunderstood. On arrival on 31 July, it became
immediately apparent that Mao had wanted Khrushchev to come himself simply so
Mao could cut him down to size -- there being no red carpet, no honor guard,
nothing that suggested Khrushchev was at all welcome. His talks with Mao
proved frustrating, tempers rising in the exchange until Mao told him:

BEGIN QUOTE:

We don't want to use your Murmansk, and we don't want you to come to our
country either. The British, Japanese, and other foreigners who stayed in
our country for a long time have already been driven away by us, Comrade
Khrushchev. I'll say it again: we do not want anyone to use our land to
achieve their own purposes any more.

END QUOTE

Mao was not so scathing in later talks, but still did nothing but lecture
Khrushchev as if he were a slow-witted child. Mao said nothing to his
visitor about the impending assault on Quemoy; not only would China use the
action to make a point to the Americans, he would also use it to make a point
to the Soviets, demonstrating that China did not dance to the Kremlin's tune,
and also undermining Khrushchev's fitful push for peaceful coexistence.
Khrushchev was inclined to the volatile, but even a milder person would have
been angered. He went back home in bad humor on 3 August, never again having
much good to say about the Chinese in general, and Mao in particular. [TO BE
CONTINUED]

The Soyuz capsule docked with the ISS Poisk module two days later, with the
Soyuz crew joining the "ISS Expedition 44" crew -- including commander
Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko, and Oleg Kononenko of the RKA; Scott
Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA; and Kimiya Yui of Japan's JAXA. Padalka
returned to Earth with Mogensen and Aimbetov on Soyuz TMA-16M on 11
September, with Kelly becoming commander of "ISS Expedition 45."

-- 02 SEP 15 / MUOS 4 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape
Canaveral at 1018 GMT (local time + 3) to put the fourth "Mobile User
Objective System (MUOS)" geostationary military comsat into orbit for the US
Navy. MUOS 4 was intended to provide narrowband tactical communications to
significantly improve ground communications for US forces on the move.

MUOS 4 was built by Lockheed Martin, and based on the A2100M satellite bus.
The comsat had a launch mass of 6,740 kilograms (14,860 pounds). Deployment
of the MUOS constellation began with the launch of MUOS 1 in February 2012,
with MUOS 2 following in July 2013, and MUOS 3 being launched earlier in
2015. MUOS 4 will give the MUOS system worldwide coverage for the first
time, with the fifth and final satellite, to be launched in the summer of
2016, intended to serve as an on-orbit spare.

The MUOS constellation replaces the seven "UHF Follow-On (UFO)" comsats
launched between 1993 and 2003. The UFO comsats followed in turn from the
FLTSATCOM spacecraft, lofted by Atlas-Centaur vehicles during the late 1970s
and 1980s. UFO also served as a replacement for the five Leasat spacecraft
operated by Hughes Communication Services for the US Navy. The rocket flew
in the "551" configuration, with a 5 meter (16.4 foot) fairing, five solid
rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

-- 11 SEP 15 / GALILEO FM05, FM06 -- A Soyuz ST-B (Fregat) booster was
launched from Kourou at 0556 GMT (local time + 3) to put the two "Fully
Operational Capability (FOC)" Galileo navigation satellites, "FM05" and
"FM06" (AKA "Galileo 9 / Alba" and "Galileo 10 / Oriana", into orbit. The
satellites were made by OHB of Germany; each had a launch mass of 715
kilograms (1,576 pounds). The completed constellation will consist of 30
satellites along three orbital planes in medium Earth orbit, including 24
operational satellites, and two spares per orbit.

-- 12 SEP 15 / TJSSW-1 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched
from Xichang at 1542 GMT (local time - 8) to put a satellite into orbit. The
payload was not announced, but was said to be the "Communications Engineering
Test Satellite -1 (TJSSW-1)". The launch was not announced ahead of time,
and no details were provided.

-- 14 SEP 15 / GAOFEN 9 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from
Jiuquan at 0445 GMT (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen 9" Earth observation
satellite into orbit, the third of six such spacecraft for Earth resource
observation.

-- 14 SEP 15 / EXPRESS AM8 -- A International Launch Services Proton M
Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 1900 GMT (next
day local time - 6) to put the "Express AM8" geostationary communications
satellite into orbit for the Russian Satellite Communications Company. The
spacecraft was built ISS Reshetnev, and featured a payload provided by
Thales. Express AM8 had a launch mass of 2,100 kilograms (4,630 pounds), a
payload of 42 Ku / C / L band transponders, electric thrusters, and a design
lifetime of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 14 degrees
west longitude to provide data services to the Russian government.

-- 19 SEP 15 / LONG MARCH 6 INITIAL FLIGHT -- A Long March 6 booster was
launched from Taiyuan at 2301 GMT (next day local time - 8) to put a set of
20 Chinese smallsats in orbit. This was the first launch of the Long March
6, powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen.

DCBB, an educational satellite, from the Chinese amateur radio
organization.

LilacSat-2, from the Harbin Institute of Technology.

Tiantuo-3 (TT-3), from the National University of Defense Technology
(NUDT), featuring an AIS maritime tracking receiver, an ADS-B aircraft
tracking receiver, and a fire-watching camera. It carried two Xingchen
picosats, with a mass of about a tenth of a kilogram.

NUDT-PhoneSat, from the NUDT, based on smartphone technology. It also
carried two Xingchen picosats.

NS-2, from Tsinghua University, which carried the ZJ-1 and ZJ-2
picosatellites, each weighing about a quarter of a kilogram.

It appears that few or none of the nanosats were based on the CubeSat format.
The 20-payload haul was the biggest number of satellites ever launched on a
single rocket by China. The Long March 6 has a height of about 29 meters (95
feet) and a payload capacity of 1,500 kilograms (3,300 pounds).

-- 23 SEP 15 / LONG MARCH 11 INITIAL FLIGHT / TIANWANG-1 x 3 -- A Long
March 11 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0141 GMT (local time - 8) to
put three "Tiangwang-1" nanosatellites into orbit. This was the maiden
flight of the solid-fuel Long March 11. The three Tianwang-1 satellites --
Tianwang-1A (SECM-1), Tianwang-1B (NJUST-2) and Tianwang-1C (NJFA-1) -- were
developed by the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They
were all CubeSats, A and B being 2-unit CubeSats, C being a 3-unit CubeSat.
They were to demonstrate formation flying and intersatellite communications.

Two of the Tiangwang-1 satellites, flying 150 meters (490 feet) apart, operated
as a solar coronograph. The communications scheme was based on the
"GAMALINK" software-defined radio technology from the company Tekever of
Portugal. The trio also demonstrated tracking of maritime traffic in polar
regions using an AIS receiver, and monitoring air traffic using an ADS-B
receiver. Other technology carried included video cameras, GPS-Beidou
navigation receiver, and cold-gas thruster system. A "Pujian-1"
nanosatellite, from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology was also
flown, carrying payloads to monitor weather, traffic, and population density
of Chinese cities.

The Long March 11 (Chang Zheng 11) is a small solid-fueled quick-reaction
launch vehicle, developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology
(CALT). Few details have been released; the mass of the four nanosatellites
was obviously much less than the lift capacity of the booster, the payloads
being carried on a test flight, since they were relatively replaceable in
case of a launch failure.

-- 28 SEP 15 / ASTROSAT -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle was
launched from Sriharikota to put the ISRO "Astrosat" space observatory into
orbit. Astrosat was the first Indian dedicated astronomy satellite. It
had a launch mass of 1,650 kilograms (3,640 pounds) and carried six
instruments, including:

UltraViolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT): A 40-centimeter (15.7-inch)
telescope to perform observations in three bands, including two UV and one
visible band, with a field of view of about 28 degrees. All three
channels had a rotating filter wheel; the wheel for the UV channels
included a diffraction grating for spectroscopic studies.

Soft X-ray imaging Telescope (SXT): A grazing-incidence telescope,
featuring 41 concentric shells of gold-coated mirrors, feeding a
CCD imaging detector. The detector was derived from that flown on the
NASA Swift astronomy satellite; it was thermo-electrically cooled to
about -80 degrees Celsius.

Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC): A radiation counter
instead of a telescope as such, featuring three identical multi-wire,
multi-layer proportional counters covering a wide range of energies,
shielded to provide a common 1 x 1 degree field of view.

Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI): A hard X-ray imager, based on on a
CZT detector, using a two-dimensional coded X-ray mask for focus. The
mask operates like a pinhole camera, with multiple holes arranged in a
"coded" pattern to allow computationally sorting out the contributions of
each pinhole.

Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM): Three proportional counters, each with a
a one-dimensional coded mask, derived from the "All Sky Monitor" on the
NASA RXTE astronomy satellite. The SSM performed targeting for the
other four high-energy astronomy instruments.

Charged Particle Monitor (CPM): Obtained local particle flux, to help
calibrate the operation of the spacecraft's particle detector instruments.

Astrosat was built as a general-purpose high-energy astronomy satellite, to
perform sky surveys; search for transient events; and perform observations of
known high-energy sources, such as X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei,
with the set of four primary instruments on a common focus to obtain
comprehensive measurements over a wide band. The launch also carried six
nanosats, including:

LAPAN-A2: A smallsat from Indonesia's LAPAN space agency, with a camera
and AIS receiver for tracking ship traffic. It had a launch mass of
76 kilograms (168 pounds).

-- 29 SEP 15 / BEIDOU -- A Chinese Long March 3C booster was launched
from Xichang at 2313 GMT (next day local time - 8) to put a "Beidou"
navigation satellite into orbit. This was the 20th Beidou launch. In
completion, the Beidou network will consist of 35 satellites, in three
different classes of orbits: geostationary, inclined geostationary, and
inclined medium, with geostationary at 35,900 kilometers (22,300 miles) and
medium at 21,400 kilometers (13,300 miles). This spacecraft was placed into
inclined geostationary orbit, being an improved design with a more precise
atomic clock and greater launch mass.

-- 30 SEP 15 / SKY MUSTER, ARSAT 2 -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was
launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2030 GMT (local time + 3) to put the
"Sky Muster" and "Arsat 2" geostationary comsats into orbit. The Sky Muster
satellite, AKA "NBN Co 1A", was built by Space Systems / Loral and had a
launch mass of 6,438 kilograms (14,197 pounds). It provided high-speed
internet services for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). Arsat 2
was built by INVAP of Argentina. It had a launch mass of 2,796 kilograms
(6,563 pounds), a payload of 16 Ku / 4 C band transponders, and a design life
of 15 years. It was placed in the orbital slot at 81 degrees West longitude
to provide data transmission, Internet, and television services over the
Americas for Arsat of Argentina.

* DIGITAL SPYING: The stereotype of a hacker is a scruffy antisocial
loner working in his basement, but that stereotype is increasingly being
challenged by the reality that governments have been getting into hacking
in a big way. As reported by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("The Spy Who
Hacked Me", 29 November 2014), on 23 November 2014 Symantec, an American
maker of antivirus software, announced the discovery of a piece of malware
named "Regin", which had been found on computers in Russia and Saudi Arabia
-- the name was derived from a string found in the code. Malware tends to be
brute-force and crass, sometimes pointedly obnoxious as an end in itself, but
Regin was very sophisticated and stealthy. Symantec concluded it had been
made by a government.

There's nothing all that new about government-made malware, the most famous
example being "Stuxnet", uncovered in 2010, which was tailored to infect
industrial controller modules. It was used to help bring down Iran's
centrifuges in hopes of slowing the Iranian nuclear program. Nobody's
talking about who made Stuxnet, but it is suspected to a product of an
Israeli-US collaboration.

Stuxnet was unusual in that it actively performed sabotage. Most
government-made malware is intended to perform intelligence-gathering, and
does as little as possible to announce its presence. Of course, intelligence
breaches can be disastrous, and in any case, cleaning up after malware takes
time and money, just to make sure it's not there any more.

Nobody signs such malware, and trying to figure out where it came from can be
tricky, based on evaluations of tiny clues and considerations of style --
there will be similarities, even re-use of code, that may link two different
pieces of malware. The "DarkHotel" virus, which was uncovered only weeks
before Regin surfaced, targets corporate executives by penetrating hotel
wi-fi networks; it is suspected to have come from South Korea, since it
contains Korean characters, and was localized primarily to South Korea and
its neighbors. Nobody really knows for sure where it came from.

There are hints that Regin came out of Britain: it resembles other malware
suspected to have been made by British spooks and contains a cricket term,
"LEGSPIN". However, there's nothing to stop malware writers from including
false leads; when the Russian government began hacking, their malware was
faked to look like it was sourced from China.

It's really not that hard to penetrate computer systems. Modern software is
very elaborate, which means it's almost impossible to make sure it works
perfectly. Anyone can play, and it is believed that North Korea, Pakistan,
and a number of African countries are in the game. Since malware isn't
going to go away, and defenses are not reliable, there's increasing pressure
for those at risk to give up on the marvelous capability of modern software,
and opt for something much simpler, stupider, and more secure. Indeed, it
appears the Russian government has been buying typewriters.

* BABY BUST REVISITED: The decline in populations of developed countries
was discussed
here
in 2009. An article from THE ECONOMIST ("Breaking The Baby Strike", 25 July
2015) discussed what some of the governments of countries affected by falling
birth rates are trying to do about it.

Turkey, for an example, is no longer having enough babies to support its
population; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blasts abortion and tells
Turkish women they should bear at least three children. More practically,
the government is introducing "birth aid" payments for new babies, and longer
parental leave for civil servants.

Payments for babies are nothing new in Singapore, where couples get $6,000
Singapore dollars ($4,450 USD) for their first child, another $6,000 SD for
their second child, and $8,000 SD for their third. Families with babies go
to the front of the queue for government housing, in which most Singaporeans
live. South Korea and Russia are also taking measures to encourage more
babies.

In every developed country except Israel the fertility rate, or overall
births per woman, is below 2.1, the rate needed to maintain a stable
population. Some not-so-developed countries, such as China and Russia, have
also fallen below the replacement rate, with China now reversing its
notorious "one child" policy. Japan's fertility rate is 1.4, while Singapore
and South Korea have replacement rates of just 1.2.

In an undeveloped country, children are an investment with a positive
material return -- the kids can help out in the fields, and take care of the
parents in their old age. In developed countries, kids are a stiff financial
drain; they require a lot of material investment in care and education, with
the effort in taking care of them at the expense of to work that can bring in
money. While the kids typically will help take care of elderly parents, they
are not under any legal obligation to do so, and may end up moving far away,
out of touch. Couples generally still do want kids, but few want more than
two.

In lands with high populations, a declining population is welcome -- but only
to a degree, since it poses problems, first and foremost resulting in
societies heavily laden with the elderly, with relatively few of working age
there to help fund their care. Opening the doors to immigration is one
solution, but the public everywhere is not very enthusiastic about bringing
in outsiders, at least to take up residence, with culturally homogeneous
countries such as Japan having a particular resistance to the idea.

As a result, governments have been turning to pro-natalist policies: a
per-baby lump sum; ongoing child-benefit payments; generous paid leave or
subsidized nurseries, Nordic countries tending to offer both; child tax
credits or tax breaks. Tax breaks are particularly effective in encouraging
high-income parents to have kids, but they are hard to defend politically.
It does seem that the more governments shell out for babies, the more babies
they get -- though that might be an artifact of parent's lobbies, out to get
more benefits for themselves.

Some policies do clearly work better than others. Olivier Thevenon -- who
examines natalist policies at the Organization for Economic Cooperation &
Development (OECD), a club of mostly developed countries -- comments: "The
kind of spending matters more than the amount." Longer maternity and
paternity leave are appreciated by citizens, but don't lead to more babies;
cash payments for babies encourage parents to have them more quickly, but not
to have more of them.

According to Thevenon's research, the biggest booster is subsidized child
care, with the state promoting nurseries to make it easier for women to
combine work and motherhood. That seems to be the big reason France and
Sweden have good fertility rates, though their relatively open immigration
policies no doubt help as well. Belgium, with state-subsidized nurseries,
has had higher birth rates than Germany; the Germans are leery of natalism,
since the Nazis pushed it, but have moved towards subsidized nurseries as
well. Efforts to automate and reduce the cost of higher education, seen
increasingly as a necessity for one's kids, should also help encourage larger
families.

However, natalist policies, no matter how well thought out, can run into
cultural obstacles. In Turkey, husbands do not like the idea of doing
housework, and mothers are supposed to stay at home. In Japan,
employees are expected to spend most of their time at work, even though they
don't necessarily work all that hard when they are; and kids have to be
painfully crammed to pass examinations for Tokyo University, or failing that
lesser institutions, making their rearing more expensive.

There's another factor that seems to be universal, common to West and East:
the bigger the city, the lower the birthrate among those who live in it. In
most countries, fertility tends to be highest in the rural areas, rates
declining with the size of the town. Nobody's quite sure why this is so --
it appears that big cities are simply not the best place to raise kids, while
they offer so many amusements and entertainments that kids become more of a
distraction.

As long as global population continues to increase, shortages of babies will
be a relatively local problem. Could we look down the road to a time when
the entire planet is below the replacement rate? That wouldn't be such a bad
thing for some generations, but there would come a time when the business of
procreation and child-rearing would have to be globally rethought -- and one
could imagine that the whole notion of family, as we know it, would at the
very least be greatly revised.

* KEEP COOL (4): As a follow-up to the previous installments in this
series, an article from THE ECONOMIST ("No Sweat", 5 January 2013) provided a
survey of air conditioning in the 21st century.

Welcome to the Persian Gulf, a land whose summers are marked by intense heat
and high humidity. Before 1950, less than half a million people lived on its
shores; today, 20 million people live and work there. Without air
conditioning, the place would be almost uninhabitable, but cities like Dubai
have made it, to a degree, less a hell and more of a tropical paradise.

Some insist that air conditioning is actually the work of a devil, blasting
it as a waste of resources; a climate-change villain; and even, in occasional
fits of hair-shirt puritanism, a diminishment of the human spirit. Most of
the puritans would soften their views if they suffered through a sweltering
hot spell; and they also fail to realize, as discussed earlier in this
series, that air conditioning began its existence in support of industrial
processes, as it still does today.

That significance can be extended to support of those in the workplace. Even
in the 1950s, when air conditioning of office buildings was fairly new, a
study of US government typists showed that air conditioning raised
productivity by a quarter. A 1957 survey of American firms revealed air
conditioning as their single biggest boost to worker productivity. Studies
show that workers in cool climates are well more productive than those in hot
ones. As for home air conditioning, workers are more productive when they
can get a good night's sleep, instead of sweating in bed.

Cooling also lowers death rates. In studies of what epidemiologists call the
"harvesting effect", summer heatwaves have been shown to cause sudden upticks
in the number of deaths from cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebrovascular
disease. A 2006 survey of six South Korean cities, for example, showed that
a mere 1 degree Celsius rise over normal peak summer temperatures increased
mortality from all causes by roughly 10%. Spain's health ministry found
that, during a heat wave in the summer of 2003, the increase in mortality was
about a quarter over normal. A study in California also showed lower
mortality rates for people over 65 when they lived in air-conditioned
comfort.

But what about resource depletion and climate change from use of air
conditioning? Such worries seem overstated. According to the US Energy
Information Agency, in 2005 air conditioning only accounted for 8% of
America's home energy use -- contrasted with 41% for heating and 20% for
heating water, which few make a fuss about. Incidentally, thanks to better
insulation and other energy-saving features, overall energy use by US
households hasn't increased in 30 years. Air conditioning is energy
intensive, but it's not used as much as heating; the shift in population to
warm places has, due to reduction in heating requirements, has helped to
conserve energy.

However, air conditioning is catching on in the developing world, too, giving
it an expanding footprint. Between 1995 and 2004, the proportion of homes in
Chinese cities with air conditioning rose from 8% to 70%. Asia now accounts
for half the global air conditioning market, with China generating 70% of
global production. Climate change, ironically, will also stoke the demand
for air conditioning. In some compensation, a typical air conditioner sold
today is twice as energy-efficient as one sold in the 1980s. A number of
firms are also promoting alternative approaches to air conditioning that,
they claim, can be even more efficient.

Along with improved air conditioning technology, there's also been a push to
design living spaces to resist overheating in the first place. Much of it is
simple: paint exterior surfaces with light colors to reflect sunlight, plant
trees to block sunlight blasting in through windows, and install insulated
windows to help block that which gets through. Proper ventilation also
helps, as do simple tricks -- such as watering down a hot roof to cool it
off. Still, no amount of trickery or puritanical exhortation is going to
change the fact that people will want to turn on the air conditioning rather
than endure a stiflingly hot day. [END OF SERIES]

* THE COLD WAR (87): The Pentagon and the AEC were adamantly opposed to
a test-ban agreement with the Soviets, as were the British and French.
President Eisenhower knew that British military power had greatly declined
since World War II, and he believed it was partly due to an over-reliance on
the Bomb. He wanted Britain to spend more on conventional forces; he
suggested that the US send more Bombs to Britain, and share more atomic data
with the UK. The US military and the AEC were both opposed, citing the
McMahon Act, which blocked the transfer of nuclear secrets to foreign
countries. Eisenhower could only point to the extensive transfer of British
secrets to the US during the war, and that Britain needed to be treated as a
full ally.

In France, Charles de Gaulle had just returned to power, and was
energetically pursuing a French Bomb. Eisenhower knew de Gaulle very well,
having a balanced understanding of de Gaulle's weaknesses and strengths,
recognizing that though he was egocentric, he was also intelligent and
generally sensible, indeed at times perceptive and shrewd. Eisenhower still
could not understand any good reason for France to have the Bomb, but when he
told French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville on 21 August that the US was
going to propose a test ban, the president got back, in effect, a Gallic
shrug: the US and the USSR could have a test ban if they liked, France would
test their nukes.

The next day, 22 August, Eisenhower issued his invitation to the Soviets to
begin test-ban negotiations on 31 October, in hopes of dealing with the
atmospheric fallout problem and slow down the arms race. On 27 August, the
AEC's McCone told the president that the US needed "one more test", and that
an immediate decision was required. Eisenhower was clearly annoyed, though
he didn't blow his stack; McCone bulldozed through the president's annoyance,
badgering him on the absolute necessity of the tests. Eisenhower caved in,
telling McCone with weary resignation that "the AEC might as well go ahead."

Eisenhower had already been getting flak from hawks like Strauss and Teller
over his invitation, and to compound the pressure to test, on 22 August the
British began a sequence of nuclear tests on Christmas Island in the Pacific.
On 29 August, Khrushchev agreed to negotiations on a test ban. On the same
day, the US began a new series of tests -- formally designated HARDTACK II
but nicknamed "Operation DEADLINE" by the media, in recognition of the fact
that it was an attempt to set off nukes while it was still possible to do so.
HARDTACK II focused on small tactical weapons.

In a separate set of tests, codenamed ARGUS, at the end of August and in
early September, the US Navy fired three "peewee" nuclear weapons into near
space from a fleet of vessels at sea between South Africa and Antarctica.
ARGUS had been inspired by the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts,
the idea being that a space nuclear detonation would create a short-lived
radiation belt that could fry Soviet ICBMs. The shots did create a radiation
belt, but it was too weak to disrupt enemy missiles. The scheme did have the
potential of disrupting or damaging satellites in orbit, since they would
spend much more time in the artificial radiation belt, but there were only a
handful of satellites in orbit at the time.

More significantly, ARGUS raised questions about the nuclearization of space,
an issue that had also been underlined by HARDTACK I, since three of the
shots had been at near-space altitudes. The high-altitude shots had revealed
that the radiation of the detonation of a nuclear weapon would generate a
powerful "electromagnetic pulse (EMP)" when it hit the upper atmosphere that
could disrupt communications and electronic systems.

ARGUS was kept secret, it seems to keep the Soviets from getting upset; they
didn't have the means to detect the tests at the time, and there was no
reason to excite them when Eisenhower was trying to persuade them to stop
testing for the moment. Of course, in the face of HARDTACK II, on 30
September the Soviets began their own sequence of "deadline" tests, focused
on large strategic weapons. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Work on perovskite-based solar / photovoltaic cells
was discussed
here
in 2014. An update from THE ECONOMIST ("Crystal Clear?", 16 May 2016),
discussed work in the field since then. There's been notable progress in
"tandem" PV cells, featuring a top layer of perovskite, which absorbs energy
from light at the blue end of the spectrum, on top of a layer of silicon,
which absorbs energy at the red end of the spectrum. Oxford Photovoltaics of
the UK has demonstrated a tandem cell with 20% efficiency, and would like to
introduce product in 2017. Since perovskite layer formulations can be tuned
to different bands of light, over the longer run, the company would like to
introduce tandem cells with multiple layers of perovskite. They are also
looking at transparent perovskite cells to carpet glass-box skyscrapers.

Perovskites are, in principle, much easier to fabricate than normal silicon
PV cells, for example by chemical vapor deposition. Perovskites decompose
when exposed to water, but sealing perovskite PV cells is not seen as a major
challenge. Oxford Photovoltaics says they have run perovskite PV cells for
thousands of hours without a hiccup.

* As discussed by a note from TIME Magazine Online, a firm named Smart Palm
in the United Arab Emirates is now installing over a hundred "solar powered
palm trees" in the city of Dubai. They're stylized representations of date
palm trees, with solar panels for branches; each tree is a wi-fi hot spot,
with a range of about 100 meters (330 feet), and also has a set of charger
stations for cellphones and other gadgets.

* An article from BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK discussed how big companies are now
abandoning their ".com" URLs and moving to their own domains; instead of
"something@walmart.com", late this year or early next, it will be
"something@walmart".

Why? Because scammers have been so enthusiastic about creating copycat
websites that look like official company websites -- but their URLs are just
slightly different, enough to be confused with the real things, both by
search engines and users. It's only ten bucks or so to set up an arbitrary
".com" address, while it costs $185,000 USD to obtain a dedicated domain.
That's pocket change to a big company, but renders scamming unprofitable.

There's also a push towards controlled domain names, such as ".bank", that
should be attractive to smaller companies; they cost less than a straight
company domain name, but the targets are smaller too, meaning it's just as
unprofitable for a scammer to try to muscle in. There's likely to be some
confusion until the new domain name system settles down, but over the long
run, the expectation is that it will do much to improve internet security.

* HOW MANY EARTHS? As discussed by an article from BBC WORLD Online ("How
Many Earths Do We Need?" by Charlotte McDonald, 16 June 2015), it is a
truism among the ecologically-minded that that if everyone on the planet
consumed as much as the average US citizen, the wealth of four Earths would
be needed to sustain the world. While it is obvious that Americans consume
more than citizens of undeveloped countries, on examination this statistic
appears, if not flatly wrong, at least a bit glib.

The meme has been circulating since 2012, when science writer Tim De Chant
produced an infographic illustrating how much land would be required if seven
billion people lived like the populations of nine selected countries, from
Bangladesh to the United Arab Emirates. De Chant was using a subset of data
produced by the "Global Footprint Network (GFN)", which since 2003, has been
trying to measure the impact of humans on the planet.

In "ecological footprinting", investigators look at how much land, sea, and
other natural resources are used to produce what people consume, basing their
analyses on published statistics on consumption and the amount of land or sea
used to produce the quantity of goods consumed. The answers are expressed in
the "global hectare (GH)", defined as a biologically productive hectare with
world-average bioproductivity. According to GFN director and co-founder
Mathis Wackernagel, ecological footprinting is "is a book-keeping approach
for resources."

The latest GFN figures, based on data from 2011, show that the average
American uses seven GH, as opposed to a global average of 2.7 GH.
Multiplying the seven GH figure times the seven billion people on the planet
gives the result of four Earths to support that level of consumption -- to be
precise, 3.9 Earths.

OK, now it gets muddier -- one issue being that the US is not in the top rank
of consumption, actually being ranked fifth among countries with a population
of a million or more. Kuwait is first with 8.9 GH (5.1 Earths), followed by
Australia (4.8 Earths), the United Arab Emirates (4.7 Earths), and Qatar (4.0
Earths). The others in the top 10 are Canada, Sweden, Bahrain, Trinidad and
Tobago, and Singapore. The UK is ranked 32nd (2.4 Earths).

Another issue is that, according to the GFN, the world is currently using 1.5
Earths, which doesn't seem to make sense. That extra 0.5 Earth comes from
surplus carbon emissions, with the GFN calculating the amount of extra land
and sea that would be needed to balance it. For the four Earths we would
need if everyone consumed like an American, more than two-and-a-half of those
would be needed just to absorb carbon dioxide. Not everyone buys this
measure as meaningful; critics also wonder if the GFN really has adequate
data to make projections for places where data isn't reliably collected.
Wackernagel admits that the GFN figures are inexact, but believes they are
underestimates.

The biggest limitation of ecological footprinting is that it says nothing in
itself on how to change matters. It is obvious that Americans, and other
folk in the wealthy world, have a lifestyle that, in its present form, isn't
sustainable over the long run, there's no sensible dispute over that; so,
isn't the real question one of how to work towards a more sustainable world?

Still, few believe that ecological footprinting is a bad idea, much less
label it a conspiratorial plot. As discussed
here
in 2012, companies often perform "carbon footprinting", a particular sort of
ecological footprinting, on their production processes, finding it useful to
help spot opportunities for efficiency improvements. Governments are buying
into ecological footprinting; Switzerland publishes footprint estimates on
its Federal Statistics Office website, while the UK has formed a "Natural
Capital Committee" to study how the country consumes its natural resources
and how long they will last.

Of course, the question of "how many Earths" does still come across as
moralistic, instead of constructive -- the intent being to afflict the
comfortable, but not to comfort the afflicted. Then again, there's nothing
much there to get upset over; we can just shrug, and go on about our
business.

* AMERICA'S ENERGY FUTURE? Every four years, the US Department of Energy
(DOE) releases a "Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR)" to suggest directions
for US energy policy. The first was released in 2011; the second, distilling
the views of more than 700 energy experts, was released in this September,
with Obama administration science wonks -- including Energy Secretary Ernest
Moniz and White House science adviser John Holdren -- proclaiming that it
identifies "enormous, under-appreciated, and underexploited" opportunities to
conserve energy and increase supply in six sectors of the US energy system,
including the electric grid, buildings, and transportation. A more efficient
national energy infrastructure could cut US energy use in half, with little
or no penalty.

Buildings, which account for 76% of all electricity use in the USA and 40% of
all energy use, are a central focus in the QTR. According to the report,
wider adoption of technologies already common in America -- such as the
efficient appliances bearing the government's Energy Star seal -- could cut
consumption in that sector by about 20%. New technologies, such as more
efficient LED lights and heat pump systems, will reduce consumption by 35% if
they became widespread as well.

The 2011 report suggested that the DOE focus on development of electric
vehicles, though that effort proved disappointing, EVs now being seen as
mostly useful for urban fleet vehicles, not general transportation. One
reason for the backtracking on EVs was, as Holdren commented, that since the
2011 report, the US has seen a "renaissance" in fossil fuel production,
astonishingly making it the world's leading producer of oil and gas -- an
"energy revolution" heavily promoted by the Obama Administration. Although
useful as a corrective to claims that Obama is a "radical socialist", that
works against the administration's push to hold down greenhouse gas
emissions, with the report encouraging new projects to increase the capture
of carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

Over roughly the same timeframe, while coal consumption has gone down by
one-fifth, the amount of wind power being produced has more than tripled, and
solar power production has increased twenty-fold. According to Moniz, the
push towards greater use of renewables is part of the reason "why we've had a
roughly 10% emissions reduction since 2007 or so."

Looking to the future, the report estimates that wind could provide 35% of
the country's electricity by 2050, especially if firms are able to increase
turbine hub height by tens of meters in certain regions, and use sophisticated
analysis systems to determine the optimal locations for wind farms. Along
with more renewable power sources, as also emphasized by the 2011 QTR, the US
needs to develop a "smart" power grid that can immediately and efficiently
shunt power from production facilities to users, with more storage
capability, plus protection against terrorist attacks, particularly
cyber-attacks; or accidents, particularly solar superflares.

Moniz says the United States and other countries will need innovative
materials and technologies to achieve energy security and protect the planet
from climate change. Along with the science and technology involved, the
exercise remains dependent on well-considered policies, and political will.
With reference to the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Paris, to take place in December: "On the way to Paris, in Paris, and sure
as hell after Paris, we're going to continue working on this."

* KEEP COOL (3): Willis Carrier was not satisfied with dielene as a
working fluid for his air conditioning systems, and went on to experiment
with other candidates. First he tried tricholoroethylene (C2HCl3), then
methlyene chloride (CH2Cl2) AKA dichloromethane; Carrier liked
dichloromethane, claiming it provided twice the effectiveness of ammonia, and
adopted it as a standard, naming it "Carrene-1" after himself.

However, in 1930 the DuPont chemist Thomas Midgley introduced the first of
his cholofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants, which became known as "freons".
Carrier visited Midgely and learned about CFCs; Midgely had one, CCl3F AKA
"Freon-11", that didn't interest him much, but it interested Carrier a great
deal. It wasn't as effective a refrigerant as ammonia, but it was nontoxic
-- indeed, it was highly inert -- and it worked well at modest pressures,
making less demands on system plumbing and so resulting in a cheaper
air-conditioning installation.

By this time, Carrier was also pushing air conditioning for office buildings,
starting with the 21-storey Milam Building in sunny Austin, Texas, which
opened in 1928. The installation featured a large cooling plant in the
basement, and a smaller one every two floors; it proved highly satisfactory.
A distributed system was used because centralized air conditioning required
large ducts with insulation to drive the cool air to the parts of the
structure without it being warmed en route. That ductwork cut into office
space; many architects and building owners didn't like that idea, and that
was why the Empire State Building didn't have air conditioning when it opened
in 1931.

Carrier devised a compromise approach, coming up with a central plant that
drove strong flows of dehumidified air through narrow conduits. Each office
had its own console that heated or cooled the air by passing it over coils
filled with hot or cold water, giving each office direct control over its
climate. Carrier patented the scheme in 1939, then implemented it in the
Statler Building in Washington DC -- the last hotel to be built in the USA
before war intervened.

Air conditioning for homes still remained generally impractical. The
Doherty-Brehm firm advertised a home air conditioning system, promising a
price "as low as $875". Just how steep a price that was at the time could be
realized from the fact that was enough to buy two new cars. The De La Vergne
Engine Company introduced the first plug-in window air-conditioning unit in
1932; it was technically crude, but it was compact and easy to install. A
number of firms licensed the De La Verge design -- though during the
Depression, few could afford such luxuries. By 1941, only a tiny fraction of
American homes had air conditioning.

With a war on, industry focused on military production, but at the end of the
war, air conditioning boomed. Carrier put his mark on the new era by air
conditioning the United Nations Secretariat building in New York City. The
UN building, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Le Courbisier, was not merely the
mark of a new political order but of the establishment of "glass slab"
buildings, paneled in glass panes that couldn't be opened, entirely dependent
on climate control to remain liveable.

Home air conditioning boomed as well, with Sears, Roebuck leading the pack to
sell home air conditioners. By the early 1950s, sales had gone from the tens
of thousands of air conditioning units a year to hundreds of thousands,
reaching a million a year by mid-decade and climbing upward into the 1960s.

Air conditioning for cars followed a similar if lagging trajectory. There
had been clumsy attempts to sell air-conditioned cars in the 1930s, most
notably the 1939 Packard -- with the air conditioner filling up the trunk and
adding 25% to the price tag. It wasn't until 1954 that the first compact,
practical car air conditioning systems were introduced, by both the
Nash-Kelvinator Corporation of American Motors, and the Harrison Radiator
Division of General Motors. In 1963, only 14% of cars sold in the US had air
conditioning -- but as the technology improved, it went to 50% in 1969. By
the end of the century, it was rare to find a car that didn't have it.

The reliance on CFCs turned out to be a trap, however. In the 1970s,
researchers suggest that the inert CFCs might migrate to the upper
atmosphere, to be broken down by solar radiation and then catalyze the
destruction of ozone molecules there, that blocked harmful solar ultraviolet
radiation. In the 1980s, a growing "ozone hole" began to appear in
Antarctica in the winters there, showing that the destruction of ozone was
not a purely theoretical consideration.

The "Montreal Protocol" was signed in 1987 to begin a global phaseout of CFCs
in refrigeration, air conditioning, aerosol sprays, and other technologies.
Refrigeration and air conditioning has since converted to hydrofluorocarbons
(HFCs), which are less effective than CFCs but don't contribute to ozone
depletion. Unfortunately, it turned out that hydrofluorocarbons do
contribute disproportionately to climate change -- and so, as discussed
here
earlier this year, there is now a search for a substitute that doesn't. [TO
BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (86): ARPA's work on the Moon shot stunt was strictly a
temporary expedient, ARPA not having been set up as a space agency. The
wheels of government had been turning towards the creation of a civilian
space agency in the meantime, with Senator Lyndon Johnson being one of the
prime movers. Eisenhower signed Public Law 85-568, the "National Aeronautics
& Space Act", on 29 July 1958, establishing a civilian space agency named the
"National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)" effective 1 October
1958. It was cobbled together from various existing civil and military
organizations involved in aerospace, the central component being the
"National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)" -- established in 1915,
from that time having conducted aeronautical research in cooperation with
military and civil aviation.

NASA inherited existing scientific space programs, including Vanguard --
though for the time being, the Army insisted on hanging on to von Braun and
his organization in Alabama. The Army's case for involvement in space was
weak and that state of affairs could not last, all the more so because von
Braun was already proposing new space launch vehicles for NASA. He was also
pushing "Project Adam", a scheme for launching a man on a short flight into
space, in a capsule mounted on top of a Redstone. One NACA old-timer had
said the idea had "about the same technical value as the circus stunt of
shooting a young lady from a cannon." -- but it was an idea whose time had
come. It would soon become a centerpiece of NASA's agenda, to be named
"Project Mercury".

The Sputniks had not only raised alarms that the US had fallen behind in
space, but also that the Soviets were well ahead in turning out scientists
and engineers. Eisenhower didn't believe that was the case, and didn't think
the Federal government should be taking a leading role in education, in his
eyes that being a matter for state and local government. However, as with
space, the president couldn't resist the pressure to "do something" about
education, and so a "National Defense Education Act" was working its way
through the political process, to be enacted in September.

The NDEA set up a student loan program, and provided hundreds of millions of
dollars to boost education in broadly defense-related fields -- science,
math, and foreign languages. Demonstrating how Senator McCarthy's ghost
still haunted Washington DC, the NDEA also included a clause insisting that
beneficiaries sign an affidavit stating that they did not advocate the
overthrow of the US government. In hindsight, the clause looks more silly
than offensive, but it was enough to make a few prestigious universities,
including Princeton and Yale, turn down NDEA money. The number of
institutions protesting would continue to grow, with the obnoxious clause
dropped by the next administration. In any case, the NDEA ended up being a
half-hearted measure that accomplished little.

* Eisenhower could only wearily shrug at notions of putting a man into space,
or taking charge of education. He also continued to be aggravated with the
under-the-table lobbying of Congress by the military brass through controlled
leaks. In August, an Air Force officer told Senator Symington of a
government study that examined the possibility of American surrender after a
nuclear attack. Without bothering to validate it, Symington played up the
supposed study in Congress, with the president being grilled by Republican
senators over the matter. Eisenhower told them he knew of no such study,
dryly saying that he "might be the last person alive, but there wouldn't be
any surrender in the next two and a half years, at least."

At the end of August, Symington wrote the president about information the
senator had obtained "from undisclosed sources" that the CIA had been
underestimating Soviet strength. Eisenhower asked Symington to come to the
White House, where he told the senator that the facts were the opposite, that
the CIA had been overestimating Soviet capabilities, adding that he "thought
it would be out of character for me to be indifferent to valid assessments of
Soviet strength." Symington was unconvinced.

The push for more Bombs continued. Although Admiral Strauss had left the
AEC, his replacement, John McCone, was just as determined to keep on testing,
working with Defense Secretary McElroy to push through a test of ABM
technology on the Gulf Coast. Eisenhower didn't like the idea of setting off
nukes over the Gulf of Mexico, believing with obviously fair cause that would
upset Latin nations along its shores, and ordered the tests canceled.

The nuclear hawks were equally determined to block a general test ban, even
as discussions between the US and the USSR on the matter continued in Geneva.
A report from the group was issued on 21 August, stating that it was
"technically feasible" to set up a workable verification system, though there
was still fussing over the details. It was a landmark of sorts: for the
first time, the US and USSR had agreed on nuclear matters. Eisenhower
ordered the State Department to start working on a test ban treaty. The
exercise would not prove at all straightforward. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from LIVESCIENCE Online,
("Panda Poop Reveals They're Bad at Digesting Bamboo" by Laura Geggel, 19 May
2015), while cows do a pretty good job of digesting grasses, not all animals
that have taken up the diet do so well at it. A research study of the gut
microbiome of pandas, the bears that eat bamboo, show that their microbiome
is still largely similar to that of their meat-eating cousins, with few
micro-organisms to help them out in eating grass.

The fossil record suggests pandas began munching on bamboo 7 million years
ago, to finally become exclusive bamboo eaters about 2 million years ago.
They acquired powerful jaws and teeth to help grind down the bamboo, and even
a "pseudothumb" -- a wrist bone that acts like a thumb -- to help them strip
the bamboo. However, their adaptation to their lifestyle leaves much to be
desired: not only do they not have genes to generate enzymes that can digest
grasses, their microbiome doesn't contain plant-degrading bacteria, such as
Ruminococcaceae and Bacteroides, which are common in other
herbivorous animals. At the gut level, they're still more or less
carnivores, only able to digest about a fifth of the bamboo they eat. They
spend almost all their waking hours eating it.

In the study, researchers did a genetic analysis of the gut bacteria in the
droppings of 45 healthy pandas living at a research site in the Chengdu
province of China. After about one year, they collected 112 samples from
panda cubs, juveniles, and adults. Except for the cubs, which drank milk,
each panda ate about 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of bamboo and bamboo shoots, as
well as up to 800 grams (1.7 pounds) of steamed bread every day. The
droppings were full of undigested bamboo fragments.

No doubt researchers are curious about what might happen if plant-degrading
bacteria from other herbivores were introduced into the panda microbiome --
with the prospect of giving the panda a great evolutionary leap in one step.
That might be too glib an idea, and in any case, one might think twice before
doing something that drastic to a rare species.

* Japanese researchers have conducted a set of experiments that demonstrate
lab rats are capable of altruism. They had a test chamber with a transparent
partition in the middle, featuring a door that the rat on the left side could
open to allow the rat on the right side to escape. When the right side of
the chamber was flooded, forcing the rat to tread water -- it wasn't in any
real danger, incidentally -- the rat on the left would open the door.

The rat on the left would not open the door if the right part of the chamber
wasn't flooded; it would be more prone to open the door if it had undergone a
dunking itself. If the rat on the left had two doors, one to let the wet rat
in, the other to get a piece of chocolate, the rat on the left usually
rescued the wet rat.

* Danish researchers investigating porpoise sonar location have found they
can focus their sonar. It is well known that toothed whales, including
dolphins, generate clicks and buzzes, with the echoes returned from remote
targets giving their distance and other data. The research showed them
switching from a narrow to a wide beam of sound -- "like adjusting a
flashlight" -- as they homed in on a fish.

The researchers worked with harbor porpoises in a semi-natural enclosure at a
conservation research center on the coast of Denmark. They were only
separated from the harbor outside the center by a net, through which fish
could come and go. Underwater microphones were used to measure sounds that
the porpoises produced, with arrays of microphones allowing the geometry of
the sound propagation to be determined.

As porpoises hunt, they switch from an exploratory clicking to a more
intense, high frequency buzz for precision tracking of a target.
Echolocating clicks pass through a fatty structure at the front of their
skull called the "melon" -- manifested as a bulge on the animal's head. The
melon acts as an adjustable acoustic lens, focusing the sound into a beam and
altering the size of that beam, with a wide angle for search and a narrow
angle for targeting and tracking. This is actually not so conceptually
different from the radar carried by a fighter jet, which will normally
perform wide-area searchers, zeroing in on a target to engage it.

The harbor porpoises involved in this study came to the facility were rescued
from fishing nets. The researchers hope their work will help develop ways of
using sound to prevent porpoises from accidentally chasing fish into such
nets. When the porpoises go to a tight beam for targeting, they may not
notice the wider net they are swimming into. Sufficiently loud and
repetitive alarms hooked up to a net may warn them of the danger.

* AFRICA DOES RENEWABLES: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST
("The Leapfrog Continent", 6 June 2015), Africa is in desperate need of
electric power. Across sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth would be as much
as 4% greater each year were power supplies more adequate, according to the
World Bank. Businesses end up buying petrofuel generators, paying many times
the rate of grid power per kilowatt-hour (kWh), just to make sure they can
operate.

Poor families are even worse off; a report by the Africa Progress Panel --
led by Kofi Annan of Ghana, previously a UN secretary-general -- estimates
that more than 600 million poor Africans do not have access to grid
electricity. They may spend as much as 16% of their income on energy and pay
up to $10 USD per kWh for fuels such as kerosene, or disposable batteries,
for cooking and lighting. That's about a hundred times the unit cost of
power in the developed world.

According to the report, fixing Africa's power problem may cost as much as
$55 billion USD a year, compared to current investment of about $8 billion
USD a year. However, Africa's power capacity is nonetheless growing,
estimates suggesting an increase in power generation capacity in the double
digits in the last 25 years. Much of the investment is going into fossil
fuel plants, burning coal or gas -- but a rising share is going into
renewable sources. In 2010:12, Nigeria's renewable power production
exhibited the world's fastest growth, at more than 15% a year, according to
the World Bank.

Renewable energy looks good in Africa because there's so much of it
available, waiting to be tapped -- sunny deserts, windy uplands, and big
rivers that haven't been plugged by dams yet. The use of cheap solar panels
by poor Africans is well-known, having last been mentioned
here
in 2012, but there's also considerable interest in centralized "concentrated
solar power (CSP)" plants, in which an array of mirrors heats a fluid into
steam to drive a power turbine. There's a certain snobbery among
renewable-energy advocates against CSP, who often regard it as expensive and
klunky compared to solid-state photovoltaic solar panels, but CSP advocates
say it can be cost-effective with solar panels -- all the more so if there's
a heat-storage system to keep the turbine going after the Sun goes down.
Large-scale electrical storage should make it look even better.

South Africa, plagued with crippling power shortages, has now set up one CSP
plant at a cost of $640 million USD, with four more plants in the pipeline.
The CSP plants are relatively cheap and easy to implement, more so than
coal-fired power plants, which can take decades to plan and build. Once a
CSP plant is going, it doesn't need to be fueled, either. South Africa has
added more than 4 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power to the nation's
electrical grid in four years, producing an impressive tenth of the country's
electricity. Costs per kWh of electricity from renewable sources have fallen
almost 70% in South Africa as it has run a series of auctions, buying power
from the lowest supplier. Africa is very bullish on CSP, with six of the ten
biggest CSP plants being built around the world now being set up there.

The "other renewable", hydropower, has even more potential. A McKinsey study
estimates that hydropower could provide about 15% of Africa's electricity by
2040, compared with a little under 10% from solar power. Ethiopia plans to
increase its electricity production more than four-fold from 4 GW in 2011 to
17 GW by 2020, much of it from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Engineers have long considered the potential of the Congo river where it
plunges down the Inga Falls, between Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, and the
Atlantic ocean. Inga Falls could be the world's biggest hydropower station,
generating 40 GW, 20 times the generating capacity of America's Hoover Dam.
The World Bank is funding studies on how to make it happen.

Although renewable energy in Africa does not seem poised to overtake all
fossil fuels, it will overshadow the dirtiest of them, coal, which now
produces more than half the continent's power. According to McKinsey, that
figure will probably shrink to 23% by 2040. Renewables also have special
advantages -- particularly for distributed power, where villagers off the
grid can get their own power from a cheap solar panel, or from a village
solar power station. It can be much cheaper to provide renewable power
locally -- via solar, wind, or "micro-hydropower" -- than to extend the power
grid to a village, and certainly much cheaper than relying on generators.

The price of renewable energy systems, such as solar panels, is continuing to
drop, making them even more attractive. Africa, long a laggard in global
development, has an opportunity to be a leader in utilization of renewable
energy.

* BACTERIOPHAGE METAGENOMICS: As discussed by an article from WIRED
Online blogs ("Scientists Unearth a Trove of New Bacteria-Killing Viruses" by
Shara Tonn, 3 September 2015), biologists have long known about
"bacteriophages" AKA "phages", the viruses that infect bacteria -- last
mentioned
here
this summer -- and have a good understanding of them. What biologists
haven't had is much of a handle on the diversity of phages. Thanks to modern
metagenomic technology, a research group at Ohio State University in Columbus
has changed that, performing a metagenomic study of a population of bacteria,
and then extracting the phage genomes.

There was, as discussed in earlier articles run here on phages, considerable
interest before World War II in using phages to treat bacterial infections.
Interest then faded out in the West, though the Soviets continued to make use
of them for treatments. With the rise of antibiotic resistance, interest has
now revived in the West.

Phages are widespread, and they can have devastating effects on bacterial
populations. One particularly deadly set of phages in a bacterial ocean
community can kill off half the bacteria in one day. Despite their
abundance, phages are hard to study; they have to be grown in bacterial
cultures, and most bacteria can't be easily cultured in a lab, meaning no way
to culture the phages that infect them, either.

Enter metagenomics. Instead of culturing the bacteria, researchers simply
obtain the genomes for an assemblage of them, nailing down the phage genomes
in the process. This is a straightforward approach to obtaining the DNA
codings; what is hardly straightforward is then sorting them all out. As
project researcher Tanja Woyke -- a microbiologist at the Joint Genome
Institute of the US Department of Energy -- described it: "It's almost like
you took hundreds of different puzzles and threw all the pieces together.
Now you have to put those puzzles together and figure out which pieces come
from which puzzle."

To make it even more troublesome, phages are inclined to exchange DNA with
their bacterial hosts, stealing genes from their hosts, and leave behind
genes that are absorbed into a host. One way to help sort out the puzzle is
to hunt for sequences that are already known and stored in public genomic
databases. That only goes so far, unfortunately; although more than 30,000
microbes have had their genomes sequenced, only about 1,300 viruses have.

Fortunately, phage genomes have a few specific tell-tales. First, they have
distinct genes that encode the protein capsule that protects their genetic
material; bacteria don't have anything like capsids. Second, their genes are
not that much like those seen in bacteria, or anything else for that matter;
find an unfamiliar gene that can be linked to a capsid gene, that means it's
likely to be part of a phage. According to Simon Roux, a postdoc virologist
on the project: "Sixty to 80 percent of the genes look like nothing we have
ever seen before."

Roux developed a program named "VirSorter" to spot viral sequences from these
two tell-tales, then used it to sift through almost 15,000 public microbe
genomes, hunting for "prophages", or phage genomes that had been inserted
into bacteria. Although there are other programs that can spot prophage
sequences in complete bacterial genomes, VirSorter is the first that can that
can accurately pull phage sequences out of a metagenomic assemblage.

The 12,500 phage sequences obtained so far are only a starter; project
researchers expect the number to quickly grow by a hundredfold. VirSorter
was made accessible and easy to use; any microbiologist with a genome dataset
can use it to search for new phages. That leads to another challenge,
building the genomes into a taxonomic hierarchy -- a "tree of life" -- that
will also require a fair amount of software ingenuity and computing
horsepower.

As the big picture becomes clearer, microbiologists and virologists will
increasingly be able to track the co-evolution of phages and their hosts,
discovering the interesting tricks that phages can play, and the
countermeasures bacteria have acquired to fight back. Researchers are
starting out from a low level of knowledge, but they're not discouraged; that
only means they have a lot they can learn.

* KEEP COOL (2): Willis Carrier's air conditioning systems were a sales
success, but he was still not happy with what he had. He could figure out
what kind of an air conditioning installation a facility might need, but it
was only by virtue of his considerable experience, and the performance of
those systems was not all that predictable. It was an art; it needed to be a
science.

From the 1880s, there had been some formal research into the properties of
moist air, a field known as "psychrometrics" -- psy-CHRO-metrics, not
psy-CHO-metrics -- but not much progress had been made. Carrier saw enough
there to build on, however, and worked to create a more effective science of
psychrometrics. Carrier devised a comprehensive set of equations, most
significantly one that expressed the moisture content of damp air in terms of
pressure plus dry-bulb and wet-bulb readings. Using charts, engineers could
then predict the performance of an air-conditioning system with some
accuracy. Carrier published his results in an influential landmark 1911
paper titled "Rational Psychrometric Formulae".

With his improved grasp of psychrometrics, Carrier could readily control both
temperature and humidity. By mixing chilled air with unchilled air that had
bypassed the cooling spray, he could achieve any desired setpoint of humidity
and temperature. Carrier then decided it was time to move air conditioning
on from strictly industrial applications, to providing comfort to the public.

That wasn't quite as straightforward as it might seem in hindsight. An
air-conditioning system represented a considerable cost -- both in terms of
original outlay and ongoing service -- and a, say, restaurant owner had no
way of knowing if it would bring in enough new business to pay for itself.
Using ammonia as a coolant was also a problem, since raw ammonia is very
nasty, toxic stuff.

However, movie theaters were booming at the time, moving up from
auditoriums to entertainment palaces, and owners of top-flight theaters could
see the benefits of air condition. In Chicago, two sets of brothers --
Barney and Abe Balaban, Sam and Maurice Katz -- built the ornate Central Park
and Riviera Theaters. An engineer named Frederick Wittenmeier installed
air-conditioning systems for these two theaters that used carbon dioxide as a
working fluid. That technology had been introduced in 1866 by "Professor"
Thaddeus Lowe, well-known as a Civil War balloonist; the system tended to
leak, but carbon dioxide is odorless and harmless, except in high
concentrations.

Obviously, Carrier was interested in cooling movie theaters, working with Sid
Grauman of Los Angeles. Grauman had already built the Chinese and Million
Dollar Theaters there; when he opened his third theater, the Metropolitan,
there in 1923, it featured a Carrier air conditioning system.

Early public air conditioning systems had vents in the floor, like heating
vents, but that was forgetting that cold air doesn't rise, with customers
freezing their feet. Soon the vents were placed on the ceiling. Carrier
also introduced some significant innovations of his own. His original air
conditioners had used reciprocating compressors, with pistons moving back and
forth, but in 1922 he went to a centrifugal compressor. It was lighter,
simpler, more reliable, and easier to keep running.

Carrier also wanted to obtain a better working fluid than ammonia for public
air-conditioning systems, settling on a cleaning fluid named dichloroethylene
(C2H2Cl2) AKA "dielene". He chose to use it for an air-conditioning system
to be installed in New York City's Rivoli Theater, but the city safety
commissioner refused to go along. Carrier got an appointment with the
commissioner and demonstrated that dielene was safe, even pouring some into a
container, then throwing a lit match into it. It burned as gently as a
candle, and Carrier got his permit.

The Rivoli was the first air-conditioned theater in New York City, and it was
also the first major public installation of an air-conditioning system with a
centrifugal compressor and dielene working fluid. The system made its debut
in 1925 with Adolph Zukor, boss of Paramount Pictures, in attendance. There
was a big crowd; the air conditioning took its time get rolling and Carrier
was worried, but soon the theater chilled out, and so did the audience.
After the movie, Zukor told Carrier: "The people are going to like it."

The further history of air conditioning would show that was an
understatement. By the late 1930s, all but a fraction of US movie theaters
had air conditioning. They became a great place to go on hot summer
evenings. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (85): Eisenhower had been feeling pressured by events; he
was then pressed to the snapping point. Although he had ordered the MELTING
POT stratospheric reconnaissance balloon program killed, the Air Force had
continued to work on it anyway. It seems that the Air Force was less
concerned about the USSR than the CIA, wanting to have an Air Force strategic
reconnaissance capability to counter the CIA's U-2, and not being too
concerned as to how credible a capability it was.

Three MELTING POT balloons were launched in July from a small "jeep" carrier
from off the east coast of Japan. The balloon reconnaissance payloads had a
timer that would cut them loose, to parachute down to lower altitude for
recovery. The timers were given settings that were too short, and all three
balloons dropped their gondolas while over Red territory. The next thing the
president knew, he was getting an angry protest from the Kremlin.

Eisenhower had a very hot temper and tried to keep it under control, but that
was too much. He called up the Pentagon; failing to get Defense Secretary
Neil McElroy, he got Deputy Defense Secretary Quarles on the line. The
president was furious, saying that if he had been the military officer who
had pulled such a stunt, he would have shot himself. Eisenhower suggested
that a few heads needed to roll, that people either needed to obey orders or
get the hell out of the service.

He cooled off -- slightly -- to then write a stiff memo to Defense Secretary
McElroy, saying "there is disturbing evidence of a deterioration in the
processes of discipline and responsibility within the armed forces." The
president indicated his displeasure with the balloon overflights and also
unauthorized U-2 overflights, telling McElroy that he wanted disciplinary
action taken "at once".

Exactly what disciplinary actions were actually taken is not clear, but that
was the end of American balloon reconnaissance efforts -- or so it seems,
since Russian sources claim that balloon reconnaissance overflights of the
USSR continued into the 1970s and beyond. The records of encounters between
Soviet interceptor aircraft and balloons are detailed and specific, and
there's no good reason to doubt they happened; but what were the balloons
doing over the Soviet Union?

It seems plausible that the Soviets were excitably chasing after weather and
research balloons that had strayed into their airspace, though it is of
course difficult to rule out the existence of another "black" reconnaissance
balloon program that hasn't been declassified yet. Balloons were a
ridiculous approach to aerial reconnaissance, but it is possible they were
being used as probes of Soviet air defenses; in other words, they were
supposed to detected and intercepted. There are no records of such an
effort, and it's difficult to think of a good reason as to why the records
would be hidden away, over a half-century later -- thought they might have
been simply filed and forgotten. Russian accounts on the balloons are
lacking in specifics to help identify their function. In the absence of any
solid evidence to the contrary, the most believable conclusion is that they
were stray weather balloons.

* The world paid little attention to the balloon overflights; the US
government of course said nothing much about them, and the Soviets didn't
make a major issue of them. The relatively muted response of the Kremlin had
the unfortunate effect of also diminishing Eisenhower's concerns about
conducting overflights by other means.

As far the public space frenzy went, it was going full blast, and in fact was
continuing to accelerate. In January 1958, Sergei Korolyev wrote a memo to
the central committee, proposing the development of an R-7 derivative with an
upper stage. The official rationale was to use the improved booster to first
send a probe to crash into the Moon, and then to launch a probe to go into
orbit around it and take pictures of the unseen lunar farside. Korolyev also
emphasized that the new booster would have military applications, such as the
launch of heavy reconnaissance satellites.

In parallel, the Americans were also creating a program to "shoot the Moon"
under "Project Baker", which was announced at the end of March. The
Air Force planned to use a Thor missile fitted with an "Able" second
stage, derived from the Vanguard second stage; while the Army planned to use
the "Juno II", a Jupiter missile topped with a cluster of solid rockets, like
the Redstone modified as the Juno 1 to put Explorer 1 into orbit. ARPA was
put in charge of the program, the agency's charter being broad enough to
allow the agency to work on space projects of no clear military utility.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

* ANOTHER MONTH: I went over to the Loveland Public Library to find they
had put up a display about, of all things, the mechanics of classic pinball
machines, with exhibits showing the various subsystems. It was a tribute to
the era of electromechanical intelligence, showing what could be done with
switches, relays, mechanical numeric indicators, arrays of little light
bulbs, and so on, with sequencing performed by notched sets of wheels. It
was thoroughly ingenious, though a fully operational pinball machine with a
window into the internals showed what a wiring nightmare it all was. These
days, we do all that stuff with digital electronics, and use a networking
bus.

In more modern technology news, I found a "PC Remote" -- like a TV remote
control, but to control a PC -- for cheap on Amazon.com. Since I use a
notebook computer hooked up to my TV to play videos, I thought it might come
in handy. In any case, it was so inexpensive as to be worth a try, so I
ordered it.

It took some time to get to my place, having come from Hong Kong, but I was
very pleased with it. It uses infrared wireless, via a USB dongle featuring
a cable on a spool to allow the IR sensor to be placed where convenient. It
has a little thumb control to move the mouse pointer, along with mouse button
equivalents, and various useful PC controls -- NEXT, PREV, PLAY-STOP,
VOLUME-UP, VOLUME-DOWN, and so on. I'm not sure it will prove very useful,
but it is fun to play with.

* I took my second twice-yearly trip to visit family in Spokane, Washington,
this last month. I normally take it in August, but it was delayed by various
difficulties -- and the US Northwest was also covered with smoke from
wildfires at the time.

I did the outbound trip, 1,770 kilometers (1,115 miles) in a single day, as
with the previous in May -- no problems, it's easier to do than I thought it
would be. As long as I get regular sleep on the days before and after
getting up very early, I can readily soak up the short night. There wasn't
much evidence of fires along the route, though I did see a few acres of
burned trees along one stretch.

Not much to say about my time in Spokane, it was all just family stuff. I
bought some flowers at the Fred Meyers store there; the clerk asked me if I
had a Fred Meyers loyalty card, and I said: "I have a King Soopers card,
which is another Krogers chain in Colorado -- it might work?"

I did some planespotting while I was in town. I'd been feeling like I was
getting into diminishing returns on that hobby, but I found a fair number of
interesting aircraft to shoot on the flight lines at both Felts Field, the
municipal airport, and Spokane International Airport (SIA). I keep wondering
about the "International" in that title, but I know they operate to Canadian
cities, so I guess it's barely legal.

I also did some shooting on the approach path. It's easy to do at SIA,
there's convenient places to park alongside the road, and so far nobody's
ever hassled me. I only got incoming aircraft about once every 15 minutes or
so, but I've become more patient. Previously, I'd not been very interested
in shooting airliners I'd shot before, but I've come to appreciate that good
aerial shots are hard to come by, and I don't care if they're new any more.
It's a bit like fishing, I suppose; just get comfortable, read a book or
something, and wait for a bite.

For the trip to Loveland, I decided I would visit the fossil museum in
Thermopolis in central Wyoming -- it wasn't very far out of my way. I had to
take two days driving back in any case, it would have been intolerable and
reckless to try to do it one day both ways, so I decided to spend the night
in Billings, Montana, about halfway home.

I dropped by the Missoula airport on the way to do more planespotting, again
having fairly good luck; and since I had time to spare, visited the Museum of
the Rockies in Bozeman. That was something of a bust; the most fun I had
with it was running into two little girls in the parking lot who were
carrying around long-haired rabbits, wrapped up in towels or such. "Wanna
pet him?" "Sure." The big attraction at the museum was a road show of
Warner Brother Looney Toons material, which I didn't find very stimulating.

I checked into the Hampton Inn in Billings and did a bit of homework that
evening. The next morning, I left Billings for Thermopolis. Trying to
navigate along back highways is a good way to get lost, but it was easy, just
as long as I knew which towns were along the route. I had to be careful
going into the towns, figuring they were speed-trapped, and indeed I often
saw a sheriff's car lurking along the road, ready to pounce on the unwary. I
still made good time, even stopping at Greybull to take pictures of aircraft
on a roadside display. There'd been an air tanker outfit that went bust
there, with decrepit old aircraft littering the airport in the distance;
they'd hauled up those in best condition out to attract those passing by.

I didn't have any problems finding the museum in Thermopolis. It turned out
to be a good news / bad news sort of thing. The good news was that it's one
of the best fossil museums I've ever seen. The bad news was that, when I
visited it some years back, it had been well-lit; now it was predominantly
dark, and it was hard to take good photos, even with the camera's low-light
mode. I should have tried the handheld night mode, though that's a very
hit-or-miss capability.

Still, I did get some good shots. One that turned out well was a nice
pterodactyl (flying reptile) skeleton. They also have an Archaeopteryx
(primitive toothed bird) fossil that was found locally, and have a beautiful
holographic reconstruction of it. The 3D video starts out with the fossil,
"lifts" the bones out of it, assembles them into a proper skeleton, and then
covers it with feathers, with the bird flapping its wings. "Just like Disney
World!"

There was a crowd of people over in one corner; I didn't pay too much mind to
them, until I took a look at one of them, and did a double-take. They were
impaired folk, some of them seriously impaired, with their keepers. They
were no bother, the keepers were maintaining a close eye on them; I just
stayed out of their way. Not as much fun as the gang of high-school kids
from the Wind River tribal reservation to the south who were there the last
time I visited the Thermopolis museum, some of the little "Indian Princesses"
being real cuties.

I didn't spend too much time at the museum, being impatient to get back to
Loveland. It was the normal unexciting drive, though going through the Wind
River Gorge was interesting -- some impressive geology, I had to stop and
take pictures. By chance, there was a convoy of maintenance vehicles running
up the railroad tracks on the far side of the river, and I got plenty of
shots of them as well. I wish I knew what they did, I'll have to poke around
on the internet to see if I can find out more. I also ended up finding a
pile of aluminum cans to recycle, still being in penny-pinching mode.

I'm sorting out the pictures now. I'm still several years behind in getting
my photo collection straight; indeed, I recently went through the whole thing
to find imagery I judged unacceptable, finding about a hundred that either
needed fixing or disposal, and am cleaning them up for the moment. I don't
think I'll get done before the end of the year. The photos keep piling up; I
took about 400 shots on this trip to sort through, which will render down to
only maybe 40 or 50 "keepers", but that still takes time.

* Thanks to one reader for a donation to support the websites last month.
It is very much appreciated. Notice also that this month's banner is on a
Disney motif. It's small, a bit hard to make out, and it will be only be up
for a month -- but I still wonder if Disney's lawyers are going to get on my
case.